An interdisciplinary seminar in Literature and Cultural History 1780-1830

Romantic Realignments is one of the longest-running research seminars in Oxford.

Past speakers have included Marilyn Butler, Gerard Carruthers, David Chandler, Heather Glen, Paul Muldoon, Philip Shaw, Fiona Stafford and Peter Swaab, to name but a few.

All are very welcome to submit an abstract — we aim to provide a friendly 'workshop' setting in which speakers can try out new papers as well as more finished pieces, and in which lively discussion can flourish.

26/02/2014

This week we're very happy to be welcoming Professor Christoph Bode back to Oxford, where he will soon be taking up a visiting fellowship at St Catherine's College. He will be speaking about 'De-frosting the Discourse on the Subject', unsubtly represented here by this extremely on-the-nose image of frost and midnight . . . All welcome as ever!

The next Oxford Garden and Landscape History Seminar will be held on Saturday 8th March from 10:15am to 4:00pm at the Maison Française d'Oxford (2-10 Norham Road); for further details, please see below.

This is a fantastic opportunity for interdisciplinary discussion, so do come along if you're able to!

To register interest, or for more information, please contact Laurent Châtel at: laurent.chatel@ell.ox.ac.uk

17/02/2014

We're very excited to be welcoming Professor Edward Larrissy to Romantic Realignments this week. On Thursday, he'll be speaking to us about the notion of "Future Romanticisms" - our second paper this term stemming from the current Counterfactual Romanticisms project, as introduced to us by Professor Damian Walford Davies in Week 0:

This paper proposes to
predict the way in which Romanticism will tend to be taught and anthologised
some fifteen years hence. The assumptions behind the predictions are best fully
avowed in advance, since they need to be supported in tandem with the
presentation of the future canon. As it happens, they are straightforward and
plausible. It would almost be sufficient to say that they could be reduced to
one single assumption: namely, that the kinds of politically liberal interest
that have been driving the revision of the reading list over the past quarter
of a century still have the scope, within their own terms, to effect further
revision and re-shaping of canon and curriculum. Still, not every change of emphasis
I shall propose can be easily derived from that single assumption, so
‘assumptions’ in the plural is probably the fairer term.

To develop the point, then. It is
plausible that ‘British Romanticism’ will be conceived in even more markedly
archipelagic terms than it is today: writing from all of the ‘four nations’
(very much including Ireland) will be regularly represented. The emphasis on
women’s writing will be maintained and furthered. Working class writing will
figure in the list. Writing about the colonial world (chiefly India) will always
be present – and (a relative newcomer) – so will writing about America,
reflecting the continued strength of humanities departments in American
universities, and their interests. The strong presence of Gothic tropes and
imagery in contemporary popular – and indeed ‘high’ – culture will support not
only the regular appearance of ‘the Gothic’ in the study of Romanticism, but a
regular emphasis on such tropes and imagery among authors by no means solely associated with it (Blake, Wordsworth, Percy
Shelley). The growing dominance of science in the academy, as well as a
continued promotion of interdisciplinarity in all subject-areas, will lead to
the taken-for-granted presence of texts under the heading of ‘Literature and
Science’ (e.g., Humphry Davy). More generally, there will be some attempt to
maintain the new historicist aim of representing the self-understanding of the
period by including texts that were famous in their own day but have until recently
been neglected.

Some obvious results flow from these
assumptions: works by Burns, Moore, Scott and Hemans will always be visible, as
will the poetry of Clare. So far, so relatively simple. But the pressure on
time and space in the curriculum will lead to an emphasis on texts where more
than one of the above themes can be exhibited. A few examples will have to
suffice at this stage. Thus, Thomas Moore will not only be reliably visible,
but he will normally be visible in the shape of Lalla Rookh, which allows the lecturer or anthologist to tick both
the ‘Irish’ and the ‘Indian’ boxes. Very similar considerations lead to the
inclusion of Sydney Owenson’s The
Missionary: this can figure in the category of women’s writing, but also in
those of Irish writing and writing about India. Southey’s The Curse of Kehama will be studied.
Examples of writing about America are not that abundant, but Thomas Campbell’s Gertrude of Wyoming will appear on most
reading lists – a poem that was very popular in the nineteenth century,
especially with American readers. Alongside this, the lecturer may be persuaded
to present some of Moore’s writings deriving from his American journey. While
many of these texts are already receiving some attention again, my point is
that in the middle term they will become as close to ‘canonical’ as an
anti-canonical inclination will be able to endure.

The last move in the paper will be
to return to the question of how the canon established from the late nineteenth
century onwards came to exist. It will be pointed out that its development was
closely linked to the preferences of writers (e.g., Yeats) as well as of
critics. The question will be asked, whether the academy is shifting its
attention away from the kind of writing that might still be an influence on
current writers – or whether such a suggestion itself reveals a prejudice about
how writing should currently look and behave. This last section will reference McGann,
among others.

Do come along for what looks set to be a fascinating paper and a stimulating discussion - all are welcome to attend the seminar, as ever. We look forward to seeing you on Thursday!

13/02/2014

This week sees the second part of our Edinburgh double-header, as Pablo San Martín speaks on the shift from an Enlightenment to a Romantic definition of 'myth'.

Abstract:

This paper explores the history of the modern conception of
‘myth’ as it emerged during the Enlightenment, and how itwas then reshaped during the Romantic
period, centring on the works of David Hume and Percy Shelley. In An Enquiry
Concerning Human Understanding and TheNatural History of
Religion Hume developed the basic enlightened conception of myth as
‘fable,’ ‘invention,’ ‘fiction,’ or ‘illusion’, which according to the
philosopher of religion Mircea Eliade later prevailed during the nineteenth
century and is still present today’s use of the word ‘myth’. In the
aforementioned works, Hume assessed myths in terms of an empiricist criterion
of truth, and regarded them as corrupted historical records which had lost all
relation to the original facts they were supposed to refer to. Shelley inherits
this enlightened conception of myth from Hume, and deploys it in his early
critique of religion (letters, prose and poems), levelling the narrations
contained in the Bible with pagan mythology. In his later poetical practice,
however, (especially in Prometheus Unboud and Hellas, and their
prefaces) Shelley advanced a different and more positive conception of myth
(which we could call ‘Romantic’) as‘true story’, ‘sacred tradition’, ‘primordial revelation’, and
‘exemplary model’, together with a more idealistic criterion of truth.All welcome as always!

05/02/2014

We're very happy to have Lucy Linforth with us this week, all the way from Edinburgh! She's going to be speaking about antiquarian objects and the important role they play in the writings of Scott and Walpole.

Abstract

This paper explores the antiquarian
collections held by Walpole and Scott at Strawberry Hill and Abbotsford House
respectively, examining their historical and material significance upon the
works of both authors. My paper will explore how the object of and objects in these collections might find resonance and representation within
the pages of Walpole and Scott’s fictional works.

In my discussion of Walpole, I will follow
the recent example of scholar James Lilley, who has suggested that the
collection at Strawberry Hill offers an insight into Walpole’s philosophy of both
antiquarianism (‘uniquity’), and of the eighteenth-century narrative of history.
Furthermore, I would also suggest that the significance of the antiquarian
object in Walpole’s novel The Castle of
Otranto (1764) has hitherto been underestimated, and therefore I begin to
explore this importance in my paper. Turning to Scott’s fiction, I would
suggest that several of his fictional works spring directly from items he
collected and displayed at Abbotsford; I hope to demonstrate this using
examples from the Abbotsford collection. I will also suggest that Scott too,
like Walpole before him, laid great significance upon the presence of the antiquarian
object in his fictions, which even acts occasionally as narrative agent.